Our Wills, Trusts & Probate team recently dealt with an Enduring Powers of Attorney case where an elderly client had been befriended by a man half her age. He had claimed to be homeless and our client had taken pity on him and allowed him into her life. She ended up making him her attorney under an EPA but soon after, realised that he wasn’t quite as he had seemed and things started to go badly wrong. At one point he was forcibly removed from her house by the police but she again took him back.

Tayntons was holding her Will and when she later went into a nursing home she started to get very suspicious, asking us to cancel the EPA. This was very difficult because on several occasions he persuaded her to change her mind and prevented us from seeing her on her own. We eventually managed to secure her a new EPA in favour of two of the partners at the firm, sparking a police investigation into the matter when the former attorney started to behave very irrationally.

What happened next?

The team managed to establish that he had taken tens of thousands of pounds of her money, including cash machine withdrawals from abroad whilst she was in care and before. He had also engineered an equity release on her house and had used the money himself. He was arrested but eventually no charges were brought against him as the case wasn’t felt to be in the public interest.

Our client sadly died not long after, having left her estate to charity. Our lawyers did manage to get the equity release money back from the lender for the benefit of her estate but unfortunately the attorney got away with his actions.